


Safety Dance

by taispeantas_laethuil



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Biology, Cultural Differences, Elaborate Headcanons, Fail sex, Five Times, Multi, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-27 01:20:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7597834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taispeantas_laethuil/pseuds/taispeantas_laethuil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lance's quest to lose his virginity to a hot alien babe hits a few snags. </p><p>Or: Five times Lance's alien hookups ended up being notso-hotso, and one time it was actually pretty okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safety Dance

The first time one of his lines actually worked, it only got as far as handholding, and he blamed the translation circuits.

Or translation microbes. Or translation whatevers. Coran had tried to explain it to him once with a lot of technical sounding jargon that might as well have been “Space magic! Shazaam- wow!” for all the sense it made.

The point was, translation had always been kind of weird. Whoever seemed to come into contact with a new language first (and because Shiro was the only one of them who’d ever met any aliens before they became paladins, every language was a new language) influenced how things got translated to the rest of them. Take, for example, the time Hunk had discovered the creepy Galran academies for their colonized citizens. They’d been translated to him as ‘residential schools’ because for him that was the term with the correct amount of ‘oh no’. When Pidge landed first, things tended to alliterate, and the names of things tended to come out sounding vaguely Scandinavian-y. If Shiro landed first… well, that depended. If he was having a good day, then things tended to sound along the lines of the Common Cultural Core that most humans learned to mediate through. If he was having a more stressful day, then things sounded more and more specifically Japanese. And then there was that time Lance had landed first on the planet Techumon while being vaguely homesick for his grandparent’s very Ashkenazi shul. They got compliments on their chutzpah, one of the less happy to see them Techumen told them to plant their heads in the ground like a jououjaba root, and the Galrans were disrupting their High Holy Days, the Festival of Light.

“So let’s go save Hanukkah,” Keith had said, like an asshole, forcing Lance to explain that Hanukkah actually wasn’t one of the High Holy Days in Judaism, even if it was on Techumon, for the entire rest of the mission while no one listened to him.

Keith had landed on this planet first, which meant that the ruling people of the planet Yvive were called Tsars and Tsarinas, because Keith was a crapshoot, and had apparently been in a Russian mood when he crashed into one of their smaller moons.

Sure. Fine. Whatever. All that meant was that he was about to get horizontal with _Tsarina_ Velaeva, rather than _Princess_ Velaeva. He could dig it.

 She was pretty. Like, really, really pretty, with light blue skin and dark turquoise hair that floated around her head like clouds around a mountaintop. She wore a dark violet robe with wide sleeves that hid her hands from view and a low neckline which really didn’t hide her breasts at all, and she floated along, leading him out to a secluded balcony with a view of the seven- well, six and a half now, really- moons that was almost as pretty as she was.

He told her that. She laughed, because she was flattered, not because she thought it was a bad line.

“It’s not the moons that interest me,” she said, her voice going low and husky. She sipped a bit of what they were calling champagne but was definitely not champagne at all, keeping her hands folded demurely in her sleeves the whole time.

The Yvivians were telekinetic. He was _really_ looking forward to that.

Velaeva then unfolded an arm, letting her sleeve slip down to reveal her hand for the first time. It looked a lot like a human hand, except there wasn’t really a thumb and the end of each finger ended in a little sea anemone thing.

Okay. Weird. But he could still dig it.

She held out her hand. He mirrored the action, and let her manipulate things so that their fingertips were pressed together. She let out a little gasp at the sensation- Lance almost did too, if only because he hadn’t expected her to feel so cold.

And then the little sea anemone things tried to crawl under his fingernails, and that was a hard nope.

“Whoa!” Lance said, snatching his hand back.

“What’s the matter?” Velaeva asked him.

“I got to be honest with you here,” Lance replied. “Sticking things under someone’s fingernails is considered a form of torture on my planet.”

Velaeva looked horrified. “Those are your _fingernails_?” she shrieked.

And that was how he learned that fingernails were considered impure on Yvive. And fingers. And hands, in general, were not good. Most of them had their hands surgically removed at birth, if they were too poor to be able to afford the genetic manipulation that would prevent them from forming in the first place.

Which meant that Lance had no idea what part of Velaeva’s body he’d been touching, and couldn’t exactly ask, because he was suddenly surrounded by guards and being accused of defiling the Tsarina.

It actually didn’t end too badly. They had a nice talk about the limitations of the Shazaam-wow thingy and a brief outline of how the birds and the bees worked vs the shargs and the wyrms, Tsar Jhevrin and Shiro had a Disappointed Dad Face contest, and then Lance was banned from any future visits to Yvive, barring disasters that required Voltron to form.

The ride back to the Castle was kind of awkward.

“Who even just… sticks it out there, anyway?” Hunk said. “Like, don’t most people talk first? Get to know one another, see what’s good and what isn’t?”

“Can we not talk about this ever again?” Lance asked, face burning.

“That sounds like a great idea to me,” Keith said.  

“I’m just saying, maybe you should talk about it next time?” Hunk said.

“We’re not talking about this ever again!” Lance snapped.

It was pretty much all they talked about until their next mission.


End file.
